The Need to Get Out

[Tape recorded on 7 September 1974.]

This is a tape about escapes, so one might call it the escape tape. I propose to talk about my escape from South Africa, the situation surrounding that, and then my sort-of escape [from Swaziland] which got me across the Mozambique border and into the arms of the Portuguese secret police, and then my attempted escape in Johannesburg. I will start with setting the context of the first one. My general purpose is to work up to recounting the experiences as far as I can, and I find it convenient to do that in the month of September, which is the month in which it happened in 1963, particularly as the days coincide – the 14th of September this year will be the anniversary right down to the day, which is a Saturday, of my arrest by the Portuguese secret police. And I hope next week to make an attempt to recapture fairly vividly the experience at that time. But first the context.

I was arrested in May of 1963 at the offices of the South African Olympic Committee where I had gone to present the case of the non-white or black South Africans who were excluded from the Olympic movement. The special occasion was the visit of a Swiss journalist, a man called Rudolf Balsiger, who was referred to in the South African press as a Swiss statistician who was closely associated with the President of the Olympic movement, Mr. Avery Brundage, of Chicago.